


all hail her great name

by manusinistra



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, mentions of clarke/finn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:11:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3507848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manusinistra/pseuds/manusinistra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a publicity stunt, the game between Arcadia and Groundridge High. </p><p>or</p><p>a high school au featuring Arcadia boarding school, the grounders as townies, and everyone playing basketball.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the game

It’s a publicity stunt, the game between Arcadia and Groundridge High. The schools may be two miles apart, but in every measure besides geography they live in separate worlds.

“We’re not even in the same conference,” Clarke says to her mother. “What’s the point of all this?”

“Public relations. Headmaster Jaha likes to be seen giving back to the community.” Abby is clasping pearls around her neck, preparing herself for the annual alumni banquet (geared toward those with deep pockets and a giving mentality). “And you know things are strained with the locals.”

“How is a basketball game going to solve that?”

“Clarke.”

Clarke rolls her eyes, but she turns obediently back to the bio homework spread on her lap.

“I’m just saying, I got egged twice last week. I don’t see how this is going to help.”

Abby sighs.

“It might not. But, thankfully, that’s not your problem to solve. I’ve got to run – money’s on the counter if you want to order sushi.”

;;

“You’re not at all excited?”

“Why would I be?”

Clarke lets loose a shot, holds her follow through until the ball swishes through the net.

She and Octavia are practicing free throws – or, more accurately, she’s practicing and Octavia’s gushing over the prospect of Groundridge boys, leaving Clarke to chase after her own rebound.

“It might be good for you, you know,” Octavia continues. “To meet some guys who aren’t asshole Arcadians.”

 _Like Finn Collins_ goes unsaid, but Clarke’s next shot clangs off the rim. She swallows, feeling Octavia watching her, pushing down at the knot rising in her chest.

“Or some girls. Though I don’t know if I can get behind you dating a chick who shops at Walmart.”

A whistle signals that it’s Octavia’s turn to shoot, and Clarke passes the ball to her with more force than strictly necessary. Still, though, she can breathe freely again, and this is maybe the first time she’s ever been glad she got wasted at the Blake party after freshman year and told Octavia her lips looked like pillows.

;;

The setup is this: one night, two schools, two varsity games. Girls play at 7 and boys at 9, with curfew extended to midnight to mark the occasion. Arcadia is hosting so there are signs everywhere, and despite Clarke’s intentions she’s not immune to the festivity: by the time she’s through with Friday classes she’s downright looking forward to the evening.

(It helps that, to show school spirit, the team gets to wear jerseys instead of the usual uniform button down, aka the bane of Clarke’s existence.)

She calls for a team dinner in the dining hall, says something forgettable about the occasion. It might include the words “civic togetherness,” which earn her a chorus of groans and Harper shoving at her shoulder. All that doesn’t really matter – Clarke’s main goal here is to make sure no one eats so many cookies that they can’t play defense, and so when Monroe goes in for a fifth Clarke shoots her a look.

Monroe is unmoved.

“We’re undefeated,” she says, “so chill out, captain. It’s not like they’re going to be the ones to beat us.”

Though she glares at Monroe for wearing arrogance so openly, Clarke has been assuming that, too – that Groundridge has no real chance against them, that they’ll be able to coast through this game. Prep school sports aren’t always great, but Arcadia has money and resources like it’s hard to believe and devotes a significant portion of them to its teams. The school likes to talk about well-rounded excellence, and athletics are an integral part of that: the women’s Olympic hockey team even came here for a scrimmage a while back (and took two of Arcadia’s players to Sochi). Basketball isn’t quite that good, but they’re by far the best in their division.

And so Clarke keeps assuming it'lll be easy right up to the moment she sees Groundridge. 

;;

They file in while Arcadia is gathered around the bench, going over strategy. The stands are already half full, and Clarke looks up at the ripple that goes through the crowd.

Groundridge looks ready for war. Their colors are black and red, and they bleed off of uniforms across faces and arms, streaking skin dark with paint. The players do not laugh or joke amongst themselves; they are completely silent, staring fixedly at Arcadia’s team.

Clarke feels suddenly bare in her white uniform tipped with sky blue.

“Holy shit,” Octavia says into her ear.

“I know,” Clarke murmurs, eyes catching on number thirteen.

The girl is not particularly tall, but muscle curves through her arms and authority radiates out of her. She meets Clarke’s gaze and Clarke's stomach drops – this is so, so not what she expected.

;;

Thirteen is the captain, and so before the game she stands with Clarke at halfcourt as the refs go over the rules. Clarke can feel her presence – the physicality of her – across the foot of space between them. When they shake hands Clarke's palms are sweating.

“Have a good game,” she says weakly.

Thirteen smiles in response, hunger in the curl of her lips. Everything about her is predatory, and Clarke imagines that this girl does not often lose prey.    

;;

Groundridge scores the first basket. And the second.

Arcadia settles down after that, settles into their plays, but a contagious unease is still there in the team. In the second half Harper botches a pass, and then Octavia’s shot goes off, and then Clarke misses an easy layup – they’re not playing horribly but things also aren’t quite right, and so a lead that should’ve been secure crumbles as the clock ticks down.

And then, well. Groundridge lights up.

Thirteen finds a new gear (or maybe she was just saving it, biding her time until the right moment) and starts blowing by everyone who tries to guard her. Clarke ends up with the assignment after Monroe runs off court to vomit up her cookies, but the girl is too fast, too explosive, and Clarke gets frustrated and stupid and picks up her fifth foul.

She watches from the bench as her team disintegrates: the lead shrinks to 4, then 2, and then Groundridge surges ahead. When the buzzer sounds, Arcadia has lost by 5. 

;;

It’s quiet in the locker room, the shell-shocked sort of silent that saps your will to speak.

The rest of the team files out quickly, but Clarke sits there staring into her locker for a long time. Since this is outside their division, the loss won’t count for the season, but there’s little comfort in that – the significance is less in the loss than the wrench it's thrown into Clarke’s world, and it’ll take some time for recalibration.

When she walks out Raven is waiting, and the whole stupid thing that happened with Finn is so beyond her capacity to deal right now that she almost turns around.

Raven must see that in her, because she sighs and holds up a pacifying hand.

“I’m not here about him, ok? That just looked like it sucked, and I wanted to make sure you weren’t in there beating yourself up about it all night.”

And though Clarke smiles it’s painful too, because this is what Finn stole from them: the ability to just be friends, without anxiety or disclaimer. She opens her mouth but before she can speak a roar wells up from the direction of the auditorium.

They exchange a look and take off toward it.

The scene awaiting them is a full-scale brawl at the court’s center. Bellamy is atop Groundridge’s number forty-four, struggling to put him in a headlock; a few feet away, one of the Groundridge girls levels John Murphy with a punch. People from the stands are getting involved too, and as Clarke and Raven watch a significant part of Arcadia’s senior class storms down into the fray. In the background, the scoreboard has visitor up by 7 with most of the second half still yet to play. 

Clarke looks for thirteen, for some reason, and finds her standing over in a corner; she's surveying the scene with mouth set in a grim line. Her eyes lock with Clarke’s, and though Clarke can’t decipher them there's an intention to it, like she’s trying to communicate something.

And then campus police are shouting through their megaphones, herding everyone away from the fight. The game is cancelled, they announce, and curfew starts immediately. Clarke is pushed toward her building as Groundridge’s teams are pulled towards their bus, and all that’s left of thirteen is dark hair fading into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm not sure what this is/why it's happening. I'm blaming march madness. There will be more of it, though, because I'm on spring break and there's still snow outside and why not write a weird au involving basketball.
> 
> also: egging = when townies drive through campus and throw eggs at boarding school kids


	2. the party

“So,” Octavia says. “There’s this party.”

“Absolutely not.”

It comes out less vehement than Clarke intends: they’re on their tenth lap around the indoor track and she doesn’t have the breath to be really emphatic.  

“Come on, you can’t just reject a thing before you even know what it is.”

Octavia, it seems, has no such problem, and Clarke makes a mental note to run extra miles this weekend. (She’s been spending all her free time on a studio art project, and while she loves drawing it won’t do to let her fitness slip.)

“I know we’re mid-season and shouldn’t be drinking,” she says, willing her lungs to stop burning. “And I thought you guys only hosted stuff during the summer.”

“It’s not my party. Or Bellamy’s.”

Octavia doesn’t say any more, looks the perfect picture of athletic concentration, and that alone spurs Clarke to suspicion.

“I told you I’m never going to a hockey thing again.”

“It’s not a hockey thing.”

A few beats of feet against rubberized asphalt, and curiosity gets the better of Clarke.

“Then what it this mysterious event?”

“Didn’t realize you were interested.”

Octavia’s grin is smug. Clarke would like to kick her.

“ _Octavia_ , ” she says.

“It’s this weekend, at a house over on Main. A guy from Groundridge invited me.”

 _Why,_ _how,_ and _what the hell_ get caught in a traffic jam on Clarke’s tongue, and then a whistle signals it’s time to scrimmage – the absolute perplexity of Octavia’s words will have to wait until after practice.

;;

The story comes out in Octavia’s room, over pizza and the sounds of Raven working on an unidentifiable sort of machine. (“Don’t mind me,” she says when they come in. “This probably won’t explode.”)

The night of the game, one of Groundridge’s players got left behind: he was cleaning the blood from his face in the bathroom when his teammates made their escape. Octavia found him crouched in a stairwell as she was leaving; she hid him under a Yankee’s cap and the ubiquity of couples on campus and walked him to neutral ground.

“And then he told me about this party,” she finishes.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Clarke, I think it was this thing called an invitation.”

“Are you sure it’s not a trap?”

“Why on earth would it be?”

“They attacked us at that game.”

Octavia levels her with a look, and Clarke’s righteousness wavers. A nasty streak of entitlement runs through the boy’s team – runs through most Arcadians, really. They don’t like losing what they think they’re owed, and in the heat of the moment Clarke can imagine a number of them throwing the first punch.

“If we started it that’s even more reason for them not to want us there.”

Octavia shrugs.

“Lincoln invited me, and I trust him.”

“Someone you know deeply from a five minute walk.”

“Please, Clarke. Go with me on this.”

“You can’t take Raven?”

“Already have a date with this guy,” comes from across the room, where Raven is now on her back underneath the machine, poking at it with something Clarke hopes isn’t a blowtorch. “Don’t have time to be sucked into your weird basketball things.” 

“Fine,” Clarke says. “Count me in.” 

;;

Dread simmers through her as they walk to the party.

She knows this area well enough, has been through it dozens of times on runs or trips to that gas station with the awesome chip selection, but that’s different from actually interacting with the people who live here. There’s a line they’re about to cross, and Clarke’s not sure what waits on the other side of it.

And then they’re in the house, and it’s a normal party, and Clarke thinks maybe she’s being a little melodramatic.

Only a little, though, because while the music and beer pong are familiar the room going quiet at their entrance isn’t: dozens of eyes pin them to the door, the collective weight immobilizing.

Then a voice greets them – it comes from a man who’s beautifully muscled and vaguely familiar, and Clarke realizes after a second why she recognizes him: of course Octavia would pick the one Bellamy fought with. (Clarke takes a second to imagine his face, the sheer inarticulate rage this would push him to, and it brings a smile to her own.)

“This is Lincoln,” Octavia says.

“I’m Clarke.”

They shake hands, and over the next few minutes he proves polite and welcoming and obscenely into Octavia; they barely look anywhere but each other and ok, maybe Clarke doesn’t disapprove.

“I’m going to get drink,” she says when it becomes clear they’d just as soon be without her.

She grabs a beer from the fridge, winds through clusters of people until she finds the back door. No one gives her trouble but there are still some stares, and an electric edginess buzzes through her: she has no real right to be here, and worries that any misstep might read like declaration of war. 

So she goes outside, sits on the stairs and breathes in the night. The tension slides out of her shoulders now that she’s alone, and though the cold bites at her face and seeps in through her jeans she’s grateful for it: it’s keeping everyone else inside. She sips on her beer, thinks how convenient it is that her mother’s in Boston this weekend for recruiting. Abby doesn’t always notice when Clarke’s room is empty, but sometimes she does and this would be a particularly hard thing to explain.

A gust of wind blows, and Clarke tucks her non-beer hand deeper into her coat, watching the puff of her breath against the darkness. It feels like it might snow, and Clarke hopes for that – she likes seeing the world made new under a blanket of white.

“I heard Arcadia’s captain showed up.”

The voice startles Clarke, too absorbed in herself to notice that someone else has come through the door. A body settles beside her on the stairs and when Clarke turns she finds number thirteen. Eyeliner has replaced the game’s body paint, and she looks younger, realer, more tangible – on human scale now where she had been a creature of fantasy.

Her eyes are still hungry, though.

Clarke swallows against a suddenly dry mouth.

“You know who I am?”

“You’re noticeable.”

And it doesn’t sound like a compliment, not entirely – Clarke knows that in most ways privilege saturates her, but she has never felt it as deeply as in this moment. Thirteen’s eyes flicker over her, and she wonders what she must look like, sitting there in a $500 coat that isn’t even her best one.

“So are you,” she says. After a beat: “I’m Clarke, by the way.”

“Lexa.”

Clarke waits for her to say anything else, waits to be interrogated or thrown off the property. Lexa just sits there, though, watching the night, hands folded across her knees.

The dark and the quiet magnify her presence, so that simply breathing feels like breathing her in. There’s the promise of something hanging in the air – Lexa has chosen to sit here with her, to be in her presence, and Clarke wants to know why with sudden desperation. She’s leaning forward, opening her mouth to see what will come out.

Then the door opens again, and Groundridge’s center sticks her head out.

“Lexa, Quint needs to be reminded who’s the best at flip cup. He just challenged us and –”

She trails off when she sees Clarke, face hardening into disinterest.

A look passes between her and Lexa; the center sighs, pokes at Clarke with her foot.

“Come on, we need a third. Let’s hope you’re better at drinking than basketball.”

;;

By the third round, Clarke feels good. She’s forgotten to worry about whether she belongs here, is cheering her lungs out as Anya (Clarke earned the name with their first win) lands her cup upright. Lexa drinks quickly but miscalculates; her cup rattles on its rim and tips sideways. Her second attempt sticks, and then it’s Clarke’s turn: drink, flip, hope for the best.

Her cup lands true and Quint’s doesn’t, and Anya throws her arms around both Lexa and Clarke.

“Suck it,” she yells, and Lexa is smiling, and Clark feels warm with their closeness.

This night has been strange and confusing and uncomfortable, she expected it no more than what happened at the game. But maybe that’s not a bad thing (but Lexa’s smile is the same kind of momentous as a buzzer-beating shot, and Clarke is breathless and glad of it).


End file.
